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Edited by Maggie Schreiner to reflect updated administrative information, 2014. Updated
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Historical/Biographical Note

Michael Harrington (1928-1989), a U.S. socialist writer and political leader, best
known as the author of
The Other America: Poverty in the United States(1962), and as the founder and leader of Democratic Socialists of America, the U.S.
affiliate to the Socialist International, was born in St. Louis, received a Jesuit
secondary education, graduated from Holy Cross College in 1947 and, after a brief
interval at Yale Law School, received a MA degree in English from the University of
Chicago in 1949, then moved to New York City.

From 1951-53 he was a volunteer at the radical Catholic Worker house on New York's
Lower East Side, and was associate editor of its newspaper, also called the
Catholic Worker. Leaving Catholicism, he first became organizational director of the Workers Defense
League in 1953, joined the Socialist Party, and shortly became the leader of the SP's
Young People's Socialist League. Coming under the influence of the (not quite yet)
post-Trotskyist Max Shachtman, whose anti-Communism and grand political strategy,
known as realignment (i.e., seeking to employ a leftist-influenced organized labor
movement as the leading force in reorienting the Democratic Party towards socialism)
became and remained in one form or another the cornerstones of Harrington's political
outlook, Harrington led the New York YPSL into Shachtman's Independent Socialist League
in 1954, and served as YPSL national chair until the 1958 dissolution of the ISL and
its members' return to the Socialist Party, and from 1960-62 edited
New America, the SP paper.

From 1954 through 1962, Harrington worked as a researcher for the Fund for the Republic,
notably on its study of blacklisting in the film industry, and wrote for liberal and
left journals of opinion such as
Dissent. A 1957
Commentaryarticle on poverty grew into
The Other America, which made Harrington a national figure, and which was widely credited with influencing
the development of the so-called War on Poverty and related local programs during
the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. The
Port Huron Statement, also published in 1962 by the Students for a Democratic Society, originally a project
of the SP-associated League for Industrial Democracy, for whom Harrington served as
liaison to SDS (he would become LID head in 1964), was sharply criticized by Harrington
for being insufficiently anti-Communist. This marked the beginning of a decade of
often sharp disagreement with the New Left, most importantly on the related issue
of the Vietnam War. While Harrington's Realignment Caucus within the SP (he was elected
SP chair in 1968) opposed the war, it did not support unconditional withdrawal. In
1971 Harrington formed the Coalition Caucus, which backed the 1972 presidential candidacy
of George McGovern in opposition to the pro-war SP majority, then left the SP to found
(in February 1973) the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, which merged, in
1982, with the New American Movement, an organization of New Left veterans, to form
the Democratic Socialists of America.

In 1972 Harrington became a professor of political science at Queens College in New
York City, played a leading role during the 1980s in the drafting of the Socialist
International's New Declaration of Principles, and continued to write, lecture and
travel widely until his death from cancer in 1989. Among his many books were two autobiographical
works,
Taking Sides: The Education of a Militant Mind(1985) and
The Long-Distance Runner : An Autobiography(1987),
The New American Poverty(1984),
The Politics at God's Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization(1985), and
Socialism : Past and Future(1989). See also the selected bibliography, below, preceding the box and folder list.

Selected Bibliography

1959:
Labor in a Free Society(Berkeley, University of California Press), 186 p.